The Alchemist Lee Jihyun
Lee Jihyun was an alchemist.
A hunter who had awakened an A-rank alchemy ability—respectable, in its way. Her specialty was brewing potions. It wasn't the sort of power that let her walk into a dungeon and hunt monsters, and yet she drew more offers than the hunters who did: lavish salaries, and a flood of inquiries from guilds begging her to join.
A hunter who could make potions had no particular reason to join a guild at all. These days even university hospitals and the big medical centers were courting hunters. Healers went without saying—people were tired of even mentioning them—and an alchemist like Lee Jihyun was just as useful, brewing potions and compounding Recovery Herb salve.
Of course, if you were chasing money, most people still ended up in a guild. Lately the conglomerates and the cash-heavy firms had taken to gathering promising hunters and building businesses around them. To pull ahead of the competition you had to lock down the good ones first, and the only way to do that was to throw money around. The security was worse than at the stingy outfits that squeezed every salary as low as it would go, but the payoff, if you landed it, was real.
Even so, Lee Jihyun had turned every offer down and was raising her alchemy alone.
The reason was obvious.
Growth.
And a higher price on her own head.
Hunters with alchemy were genuinely rare—you could count them. Even among those the Hunter Association had registered in the alchemy field, there weren't a thousand in all of Korea. More than ninety-five percent of them sat at C-rank or below, which meant an A-rank alchemist like Lee Jihyun had an extraordinarily high ceiling. And she was young. For someone with her whole life still ahead of her, this stretch of time was an investment in the future. A few hard years of grinding levels and raising skills, she was certain, would let her earn dozens—hundreds—of times any salary she could command right now, or generate the profit herself. Alchemy, like every other hunter ability, only got better as it grew.
Not every potion was the same potion. Lee Jihyun had begun, however faintly, to grasp that truth of the craft. Every hunter knew that the same ability produced different results depending on the skill used in the brew; ability rank and skill rank weren't the same thing, so of course the product wasn't either. Far fewer alchemists, though, had gone on to study how the grade and condition of the ingredients themselves changed the outcome.
Which was why she was out at Hangang Market in person, hunting down Recovery Herb.
Raising an alchemy level demanded both variety and volume, and both cost money. If she couldn't secure both, she had to lock down at least one for certain—so she chose volume. Recovery potions. Everyone wanted them. Recovery Herb berries held a fairly fixed price, and processing them into potions left a thin margin. Selling as an individual meant taxes, or shaving the price for a cash deal, and once you set that more-or-less-identical market rate aside it was almost embarrassing to call what remained a profit. Still, experience points remained. No losses, and experience gained. That alone was reason enough to wear out her shoes.
So today, too, Lee Jihyun was making the rounds along the Han. Footwork and margins aside, what mattered most was luck.
"Recovery Herb's been impossible to find lately."
The hunter market was more than ten years old. It was past time for the waters to turn red, and it wouldn't have been strange to hear that the dungeons were saturated, with nothing left to dig. Instead, day by day, the dungeons only multiplied, and the demand for hunters climbed with them. Rarer resources turned up in greater quantities, of course—but far from falling in value as they were used, they rose. The world no longer turned without dungeons.
Recovery Herb in particular—the most basic resource tied to life itself—had become so precious that for three days running you couldn't catch so much as a glimpse of it at the market. It wasn't that there was no supply. Once the herb came out, though, there were so many easy ways to sell it at a decent price that hunters simply couldn't be bothered to haul it all the way here. In the end the only option was to buy dear, and even at those prices it vanished the moment it appeared. Finding a decent specimen by wandering this vast market alone was like plucking a star out of the sky. She would have choked it down gladly, tears and all, for even one or two in poor condition.
Today, though, her luck was good.
"Recovery Herb! Berries! Leaves! Why is there so much?"
She had been sticking to the quieter corners to begin with—anywhere with foot traffic, the herb was long gone—when a berry glowing a lucid red caught her eye even from a distance, and she broke into a run. The crowd already gathered in front of it told her she wasn't wrong.
Recovery Herb.
Up close, there was no mistaking it. Dozens of berries, and leaves enough to look as if someone had torn up a patch of weeds. Startled, Lee Jihyun looked at the person selling them.
"Is this stolen?"
The quantity was so unbelievable the words had leapt out of her with no manners attached. Recovery Herb wasn't some herb so rare you could barely lay eyes on it. Get lucky, find a dungeon planted thick with the stuff, and you could gather this much easily enough. But in her eyes, even the condition was excellent.
"No—did you grow these? Why are they in such good shape?"
Pure admiration spilling out of her, she crouched in front of the herb and checked the berries with her own eyes. That was her private philosophy of alchemy: the freshness of what went in, the shape, the size—all of it mattered enormously. Even if the item window called two berries the same E+, a small, dingy one produced a potion whose restored vitality was visibly poorer.
And stock like this still hadn't sold? The thought that it was absurd lasted only until she saw the price tags, and then she had no choice but to nod.
"D-plus. C-minus. The prices..."
A grade that made sense of the luster, and of berries a good twenty percent larger than ordinary Recovery Herb fruit. She had already confirmed through the item information that the seller hadn't faked the ranks. Grade and quantity both so fine she half wondered if he really had grown them. No seller was going to answer a question like that, but she was genuinely curious.
And greed stirred. If she could buy the whole lot, how many potions could she brew? Couldn't she raise her level by at least three? Potions were her specialty, but Recovery Herb came as a set—the leaves went into salve—so of course those had her eye as well. Salve was a kind of alchemy too. Most people just ground the leaves, mixed in whatever came to hand, and smeared it on like ointment. A salve made with a skill was bound to work better.
She stole a glance at the seller.
Handsome. Tall, too. A chic indifference, the look of someone who had never once known hardship, was plastered thick between the good looks—along with plain annoyance. Even now his face broadcast, loud and clear, that he wanted to sell and go home, and the people gathered around didn't dare open with a haggle.
It was almost funny. She knew some of the merchants who squatted this market all day: the ones who laid their brass faces down, latched onto a sucker, and beat the price into the ground. Tumors of the place. And even they couldn't bring themselves to try.
Which made a certain sense, because the sword in the handsome man's hand was genuinely threatening. Paired with that expression, he didn't so much read as a mad dog—that was a bit much—as a devastatingly handsome wolf gone mad. The feeling that if you poked him wrong, he really would bite.
So Lee Jihyun hesitated to speak as well. The first thing that came to mind was her bank balance. If this many people couldn't bring themselves to haggle and still wouldn't leave, it meant they couldn't let the goods go. If the quality looked good to her, it looked good to everyone else. So a decision had to be made: buy dear and use it, or walk away. Staying put meant they were all waiting for the moment to buy, expensive or not.
Even a loan...
Would a chance like this ever come again?
She had already been thinking that someday, sooner or later, a day would come when she had to invest in her own growth.
For now, I should at least say something.
Before she could gather the courage to open her mouth, the seller spoke first.
"You're an alchemist?"
"...Sorry? Me?"
"Yes."
"Ah—yes! How did you... Yes. I'm an alchemist."
Even as she echoed a question she hadn't seen coming, she was already nodding. The man looked her over, up and down, from the crown of her head to the tips of her feet. His gaze paused somewhere in the middle, staring openly enough to warm her face—but the words that followed washed the embarrassment clean away.
"Give me your number."
"...Pardon?"
"I'll sell you the whole lot. Let me have your number. Let's talk somewhere else."
"..."
What was this? Was he hitting on her? For an instant her mind went pure white.
But even then, her instinct held. The plan to succeed. It issued an order to a body that had locked up, obedient to the last.
A nod. Another nod.
Her phone passed into the man's hand.